Une chronologie de la Mésopotamie antique

Farming villages spread across the southern floodplain and the first temple platforms are raised, at Eridug among other places. The pattern that becomes a city — a shrine at the centre, irrigation around it — is already visible.

Sources : Ubaid period · Eridu

Uruk grows into arguably the world's first true city, tens of thousands of people behind a great wall. The age of firsts: monumental temple building, the fast potter's wheel, mass-produced beveled-rim bowls, and the earliest known writing, which begins as temple accounting rather than literature.

En savoir plus : Uruk rises, the first great city · Cuneiform and the first writing

Sources : Uruk period · Uruk · Proto-cuneiform

A short transitional phase. Writing moves from pictures towards wedges as the reed stylus is pressed rather than dragged, and the sign inventory begins to shrink towards something a scribe could learn.

En savoir plus : Cuneiform and the first writing

Sources : Jemdet Nasr period · Cuneiform

Competing city-states — Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Kish, Umma — with kings, treaties and border wars. The Royal Cemetery at Ur belongs here, and so do the semi-legendary rulers the Sumerian King List names, Gilgamesh among them. Cylinder seals become the ordinary instrument of authority.

Sources : Early Dynastic Period (Mesopotamia) · Sumerian King List · Cylinder seal

Sargon of Akkad brings the Sumerian cities under one rule, the first empire of the region. Akkadian, a Semitic language, is written with the same cuneiform signs Sumerian used, and for centuries the two are read side by side.

Sources : Akkadian Empire · Sargon of Akkad

The last great Sumerian-speaking state. Ur-Nammu raises the ziggurat over Nanna's house and his son Shulgi runs an administration that leaves tens of thousands of tablets. It ends around 2004 BCE under Ibbi-Sin, a fall mourned in the Lament for Ur.

Sources : Third Dynasty of Ur · Ziggurat of Ur · ETCSL

Sumerian survives as a learned and liturgical language rather than a spoken one, and the scribal schools copy it endlessly — which is precisely why we can read Sumerian literature at all. Most surviving copies of the great poems are schoolwork from these centuries, much of it excavated at Nippur.

En savoir plus : Cuneiform and the first writing

Sources : First Babylonian dynasty · Eduba · ETCSL

Assyria rules from Nineveh, and Ashurbanipal assembles a library meant to hold the whole written tradition, deliberately collecting older Babylonian and Sumerian texts. That act of hoarding is the reason the Epic of Gilgamesh survived to be found.

En savoir plus : The rediscovery of Gilgamesh (Nineveh, 1850s; the 1872 reading)

Sources : Neo-Assyrian Empire · Library of Ashurbanipal · Nineveh

Babylon's last age of independence. Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds the ziggurat Etemenanki and the Ishtar Gate, the glazed blue brickwork most people now picture when they imagine Mesopotamia — though it belongs some two and a half thousand years after Uruk's founding.

Sources : Neo-Babylonian Empire · Etemenanki · Ishtar Gate

Cyrus takes Babylon in 539 BCE. Cuneiform keeps being written for centuries after political independence ends, mostly by astronomers and temple scribes; the latest securely datable cuneiform tablet is an astronomical text of roughly 75 CE. Then the script is simply forgotten, and stays forgotten for over seventeen hundred years.

En savoir plus : Cuneiform and the first writing

Sources : Achaemenid Empire · Cuneiform

European excavation at Nineveh and Nimrud sends thousands of tablets to Europe. In 1872 George Smith, working through the Ashurbanipal material at the British Museum, reads a flood account older than Genesis and realises what he is holding. The literature of Sumer and Babylon returns to the world, and everything on these pages depends on that.

En savoir plus : The rediscovery of Gilgamesh (Nineveh, 1850s; the 1872 reading)

Sources : George Smith (Assyriologist) · Library of Ashurbanipal · Epic of Gilgamesh